Truths of the Trade: Slavery and the Winterthur Collection
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  • About
  • The Exhibition
    • Consumption
    • Commerce
    • Control
    • Online Only: Creators
  • View the Objects
    • Gin decanter
    • Sugar bowl
    • Washington cake plate
    • Textile merchant letterbook
    • Shipping record
    • Madeira bottle
    • “New World” map
    • Tobacco pipe
    • Tobacco jar
    • Telescope
    • Shirt
    • Thomas Day Bureau
    • Commeraw jug
    • Urn stand
    • Silver spoon
    • David Drake crock
    • Benjamin Lay
    • Slave tax badge
    • Hanging bookcase
    • Vincent Oge
    • The Cabinet
  • Watch & Listen
    • Videos
    • Music
  • Join the Conversation
  • Credits

The Exhibition

A recently acquired double cabinet that, at first glance, appears unassuming in its construction and design provided the spark for this exhibition. Once open, the cabinet’s drawers reveal its complex history and active role in the transatlantic trade networks between Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America that transported shiploads of goods and captive people during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Winterthur’s collection is deeply entangled in these trade networks fueled by slavery. Where documentary sources can omit the experiences of enslaved peoples in the Atlantic world, surviving material culture speaks from every spoonful of sugar baked into a cake or thread of cotton woven into a shirt. International commerce, consumption, structures of control, and enslaved creators all linked slavery to commodities like these-- the things which shaped early America and, consequently, the collection at Winterthur.

Truths of the Trade investigates objects at the epicenter of these narratives of transatlantic trade and its legacy. We invite you to consider the multiple meanings and complex histories each museum and library object offers.

Consumption

Consumption

Commerce

Commerce

Control

Control

Online Only: Creators

Online Only: Creators

Curated by graduate students from the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and Department of Art History during the 2017-2018 academic year, Truths of the Trade investigates the variety of themes that connect early American objects to the history of enslavement and Atlantic trade. We invite you to consider the multiple meanings these objects hold.

 

 

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